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Comment by ohthehugemanate | Hacker News Reader

I get so frustrated reading anything in the popular press about nuclear power. Everyone commits the same fucking fallacy over and over again: measuring it against an absolute idea instead of anything in the real world. Even here in the HN comments, I see "if it can be made safe." In TFA, it's the explanation that people are afraid of a three mile island or Chernobyl event, that his killer feature is the impossibility of meltdowns.

Here in the real world, you have to measure options against other real world options. The other real world options we have for baseload power on this scale are fossil fuels, primarily coal. Coal plants emit much more radiation than nuclear plants - even old ones. There's lots of research about HOW MUCH more radioactive coal power is, but we're talking about anywhere from 50-200% more. Coal power is responsible for 800,000 deaths per year, WHEN IT'S WORKING PROPERLY. That's the bar nuclear, and any other alternative baseload power source, has to beat. It doesn't have to failure proof, it doesn't have to have zero deaths. It just has to be significantly better than the alternatives.

Refusing to consider a power source unless it has zero deaths, zero radiation, zero side effects for all time, is living in a fantasy world. It's the paradigm promoted by the fossil fuel industry, and bought hook line and sinker by the dumber end of the environmentalist movement. And it keeps us from ever decreasing our power generation carbon footprint.

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> The other real world options we have for baseload power on this scale are fossil fuels, primarily coal.

Sure, but... will this be the same in 10 years? 20? 50? Within merely the past 3 years, the amount of battery energy storage has expanded by a few orders of magnitude.

Because when you build a nuclear power plant, it takes a minimum of a decade to go from on paper to operation, and the operational life, which pays off the capex at the beginning, is hopefully, at least 50.

Nuclear power isn't agile. It has poor reactivity to future market changes. It costs billions to get up and running, and isn't modular. You can't commission it in 100MW increments. A solar power plant requires a dozen handy men and a couple of electrical engineers to maintain, a nuclear power plant requires a few dozen nuclear engineers. Solar power doesn't have publicly socialized decommissioning or waste storage costs.

I'm not trying to tell you nuclear doesn't have a future. What I am saying, with the likes of Tesla Energy and the rise in solar + battery storage, is that the energy grid is in for turbulent times in the next few decades. This makes the economics of nuclear questionable - we don't know if it is going to be economically viable in a few decades.

If I had $10b? I wouldn't touch the nuclear energy sector, personally.

And why is all that? Red tape and bureaucracy, while the world literally burns. If the same rules applied to coal or even gas burning generators the cost would exceed that.

Nuclear power stations are extremely modular, there are at least twenty of them circling australian waters as I type. I'm going to go out on a limb and venture that you will find less coal and solar powered submarines than that.

These issues are not technical, they are political, and rooted in irrational bullshit propagated by stupid and irresponsible people.

> And why is all that? Red tape and bureaucracy, while the world literally burns.

Can I ask what specific requirements surrounding the development and operation around nuclear plants constitutes red tape in your opinion? My understanding is that most of the regulations concerning operation are in place to ensure the possibility of a disaster is minimized to nil.

> These issues are not technical, they are political

As expressed in my above comment, I would argue that nuclear power's problems are neither technical nor political, but nearly totally economic in nature. It's on the losing side of current trends.

You can start by listing everything required from a nuclear blueprint, that is not required of a coal blueprint. A industry that kills hundreds of thousands of people a year operating within 'acceptable' constraints, as I said. "Minimising disaster to nill" is a absolute and ridiculous fallacy, require the same of coal and see what the costs tally to.

We are past the point where we can entertain fictions like "economics" and "trends" and treat them like they were carved from the gaze of Kek on the buttoks of the whore of Babylon, towering over the trembling spirit of powerless men. Seriously "trends" "economics" wtf does that even mean ?

A plane hitting a coal plant has a vastly different threat potential than a plane hitting a nuclear fission plant, just as one example where just because both structures are "power plants", it doesn't mean there aren't different safety requirements, even if you remove all the "red tape".

Does it? Who told you that, or is it simply something you believe because its "obvious".

Chernobyl's second reactor is happily churning away in the middle of a wildlife paradise. If that is what the world's worst nuclear disaster has come to then I think we can have a good hard look at why a nuclear plant costs tens of billions of dollars, the majority costs sunk into compliance. Compliance required and inspired by irrational fears.

How about you start to provide some sources that show that current security measures are indeed purely bureaucratic, irrational vestiges and not actually required. Also, your tone is not appreciated and unnecessary in a discussion like this

This [0] is an F-4 hitting a concrete wall and was used to inform the design of containment walls around reactors.

Would there be some shitty days for people and things outside the containment wall? You bet! But there wouldn't be any shitty nuclear days. In fact, I suspect radioactivity release would be worse with a coal plant crash as it would release the nasty stuff that we do manage to scrub out of the exhaust.

[0] https://youtu.be/RZjhxuhTmGk

> I'm going to go out on a limb and venture that you will find less coal and solar powered submarines than that.

To be fair, submarines are an entirely different use case compared to public energy grid generation. The former requires high power density with low weight. Coal and solar don't tend to deliver that underwater. Nuclear is indeed one of the top choices for a submarine. The economic point I'm making isn't applicable twenty thousand leagues under the sea.

But it is applicable for conventional energy grid generation, and it performs poorly compared to solar and battery storage, so much so that the world is currently building several large nuclear power plant's worth of capacity annually with solar alone.

Marine nuclear reactors are pretty small, so you could commission nuclear power in small increments. I guess it's not typically done this way because the red tape overhead for a new nuclear plant is so huge that you want a big reactor to make the effort worthwhile.

No it's because marine reactors require highly enriched uranium to get the power density to weight ratio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion#Diff...

As you might guess, highly enriched uranium is trivial to make "dirty bombs" out of and a small step away from actual fission bombs. So it's avoided like plague in nuclear engineering unless it's absolutely performance critical and will be used in a highly secure place - like naval submarines & aircraft carriers.

Not only dirty bombs, but actual nuclear weapons. With the more than 90% highly enriched uranium found in submarines, you can make a Hiroshima-type gun assembly device without much technical sophistication.

I'm no nuclear engineer, but I assume that it's not too hard to make the reactors slightly bigger and refuel them more often for civilian purposes.

Wonder if you've read the famous Paper Reactors Real Reactors paper:

http://ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/Rickover.pdf

While the parent comment essentially reflects my view over the last few years, your points above are what I have come to understand more recently, so I am a bit conflicted about what the best way forward is.

In addition, I think that pragmatism requires us to acknowledge that nuclear has too much of an image problem for it to be a serious contender for new investment in many countries. That investment will come up against all sorts of political and social pushback. Such pushback could blow out the time to build a new plant yet again, compounding your point about renewables/storage progress that occurs in the meantime. Germany is shutting down its few nuclear plants in favour of new coal ones. If that doesn't demonstrate an image problem, I don't know what does. It sucks, but it's the reality of the situation.

I think those countries that have succeeded with nuclear power over the last few decades have done well, and should continue. Electricity prices in France are very cheap compared to Germany (I've lived in both places recently), and their emissions from power generation are tiny compared to their neighbours: http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/el... . I wish my country, Australia, had jumped on board with nuclear decades ago. We have the uranium, we have the space, and we have a horrid attachment to coal that we need to be rid of.

But for countries like Australia without an existing nuclear apparatus, its difficult to justify the investment when there are much more politically acceptable places for that money to go, with much quicker results. Places which are rapidly decreasing in cost, and are part of an industry currently undergoing massive research and investment across the world, guaranteeing further improvements.

The flip side for me, though, is that even 50 years from now when renewables and storage are prevalent and fantastic, we will still need some form of base load power. We don't want it to be coal. But then, how many governments bother planning for the long term future these days? Mine sure as hell doesn't.

> pragmatism requires us to acknowledge that nuclear has too much of an image problem

That's a cop out or a serious mark against democracy. Energy is fundamental to civilization. Making the wrong move in this domain can put a society at a permanent disadvantage to others. If nuclear is indeed a better option, the pragmatic path is to pitch the evidence.

You make a good point. But one should add that:

A) Nuclear power is not available to all countries

B) No country operates in isolation. so e.g. if Australia decided to convert 100% to nuclear energy but other countries opposed it, they could impose sanctions (e.g.)

The NPT gives all countries the right to civilian nuclear power in exchange for an inspection regime.

Interesting point! I had not known that the NPT gave access to Nuclear energy to signatories.

Representative democracy is all about the acknowledgement of different views, so policies are often compromises or cop-outs. So not only is it both, it is an acknowledgement of recent history and current attitudes in various countries around the world.

More broadly, I can think of two notable examples from the past twelve months where strong democracies made insanely bad decisions despite strong evidence suggesting they shouldn't.

From an Australian perspective, we've had multiple long-term initiatives implemented by a government only to have the opposition rail against them (and eventually, repeal them) for no real reason beyond party differentiation. Long term projects often can't survive election cycles.

With renewables and storage we seem to have an active industry with broad support across the populace, and the only real political differentiation involved is at what pace to set. Having something we can actually do right now seems wiser than trying to get something off the ground which has a strong chance of going nowhere.

Yes, our democracies are quite broken. We need to try and make progress regardless, because we can't sit and wait around until they're working better.

Just a side thought: I wonder if the decommissioning of nuclear power plants might also partially be explained by an (at least perceived) increased risk of domestic terrorism? They're single points of failure, and they fail in spectacular fashion, making them excellent targets for someone wanting to cause havoc and terror.

They are also very well protected. The concrete reactor shields in Germany are designed to contain the core even if a figher jet flies into the reactor building at full speed (and have been designed that way for ages, way before 2001). The power plants and storage sites are more heavily guarded than just about any other areas in the country including military bases, so it's not possible to drive a truck with explosives up to the reactor building either.

It is way easier to commit attacks using chemical weapons or anthrax or conventional bombs, or to set off a dirty bomb with imported radioactive material than to breach a western European nuclear plant.

> It is way easier to commit attacks using chemical weapons or anthrax or conventional bombs, or to set off a dirty bomb with imported radioactive material than to breach a western European nuclear plant.

Unless you happen to be one of the recent terrorists who committed attacks in Europe, and be employed in a nuclear powerplant.

Then things can quickly go wrong.

I would imagine the vetting process is rather extensive.

Yet an IS terrorist worked at a nuclear powerplant. This wasn't hypothetical — this actually happened.

> It costs billions to get up and running, and isn't modular.

One of my primary concerns with nuclear power is that it's very much dependent on the actual order of things carrying on as usual, meaning stable Governments, skilled technicians available etc. What would have happened if Syria (a secular state until not that long ago) had had civilian nuclear plants? Answer: they would most probably have fallen under the hands of either ISIS or an Al-Qaida offshoot. We had the same issue after the Soviet Union collapsed. Had the political uncertainty and power vacuum continued for much longer into the '90s then nobody knows what could have happened to their civil nuclear plants.

How is this more concerning than the raw amount of weapons that a lying around everywhere? Giving them access to cheap power or a potential local weapon doesn't seem like that pressing of an issue.

> How is this more concerning than the raw amount of weapons that a lying around everywhere?

Is this a serious question? Conventional weapons are a lot less deadly if captured by the wrong people compared to nuclear-based installations.

If someone has the tech to convert nuclear fuel to weapons, they are a short step from converting raw ore to nuclear weapons.

You don't necessarily need to convert the nuclear fuel to weapons, you just need to blow the whole thing up, which ISIS is more than capable of doing, and then see how the winds carry the radio-active clouds 3,000 km away. For example see this map: http://i.imgur.com/zlRGSs3.jpg , more especially Austria.

They're not. The power of nuclear weapons is like 1% the fuel, 99% complex electronics you need to have them actually detonate with meaningful yield.

I'm not quite sure what you're driving at but the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima (the "gun" design, Little Boy) did not rely on complex electronics.

It also required quite a lot of fissile material and wasn't all that powerful. Dropped on lower Manhattan, it wouldn't even reach midtown Manhattan. See for yourself at http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/. I was actually quite surprised to realize that a "city" in 1940s was something much smaller than what we call a city today.

The point I'm aiming at is that nuclear weapons are (still) something expensive, hard to make, and useful only for nation states with large military budgets. Going for dirty bombs would be a better strategy for terrorists.

The second point I'm aiming at is that nuclear is not as scary as Hollywood seems to have made us believe.

I'd venture to guess that most people would regard the quarter of a million people dead and billions in property damage from an airburst over Manhattan (what that site indicates would happen with a Little Boy-style device) as quite significant. Losing the NYSE might just possibly have a small effect on the overall economy, as well.

> The point I'm aiming at is that nuclear weapons are (still) something expensive, hard to make, and useful only for nation states with large military budgets.

The fissile material is quite expensive, and requires a state-level actor's resources or cooperation to create or obtain. You're not going to take fuel directly out of a reactor and use it in a proper bomb. If that's the point you were trying to make, okay.

On the other hand, a simple bomb is not difficult to make given the necessary, weapons-grade material. I cannot even imagine why you think a terrorist organization would not find such a device useful.

Chernobyl killed 38 people directly, and led to a moderate increase in cancer rates. I'd say 1000 bullets could outkill it.

The concern for me is that a nuclear power plant and its associated spent fuel storage pools are a facility that requires an unwavering commitment to maintenance and upkeep by highly specialized personnel—not just for as long as you want power out of it, but for decades beyond.

Coal isn't like this. If you stop needing power, you stop feeding it coal, and the machinery can sit there idle, doing no further harm.

I'm not a coal-booster, but I absolutely see the concern about regime change and commitment to the safety of a nuclear installation. Between Trump and Brexit, how confident are we that even first world nations are capable of taking on the long term responsibility for such a project?

"Between Trump and Brexit, how confident are we that even first world nations are capable of taking on the long term responsibility for such a project?"

Extremely.

This post did nothing to advance the conversation. There's nothing thought invoking, no statistics, and no argument. Please provide substance to your posts in the future.

WKUK did a skit on this; well, more a commentary on the social/political contract, but still related and amusing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKERC6F7mSM

That was a fantastic video! Thanks for sharing it.

>You can't commission it in 100MW increments.

IANANS (..Not a Nuclear Scientist ) but this seems like a feature, not a bug.

While Solar and other renewables are pretty awesome and we should continue investing in them, I also think it makes a LOT of sense to invest in nuclear energy, get off dirty coal completely (e.g. France) and then transition from Nuclear to other sources as and when they become available. Because right now the biggest greenhouse gas emissions (AFAIK) are from coal power plants and vehicles; the latter we seem to have a promising solution (electric vehicles).

Coal is more or less already dead. US production dropped from near 60% in late 80's to under 40% now in part because it's too expensive vs Wind and not flexible. Paying even more per KWH for even less flexible generation is a nonstarter unless it can very quickly respond to shifting demand. Especially with how long these plants need to last.

At this point safety is a non issue with nuclear it just needs dramatically lower costs or somewhat lower costs and vastly increased flexibility. The problem is heat engines cool down when you stop producing power and they both have huge thermal loads vs natural gas.

But this way of thinking has kept back nuclear Energy for the past 3 decades already. 3 decades have past with no investment in nuclear energy research because 'the next technology is right around the corner'

Modular nuclear energy:

http://www.nuscalepower.com/

That is just the biggest amount of misinformation and SV bias I have seen in a long time! The hole point in nuclear is that it is cheap and fast to implement by GW/h, the first nuclear power plant (Shippingport) became online in 1958, by 1978 15% of all US energy on the grid was from nuclear plants. It is modular, can be made near the consumption center, it is baseload, high density, virtually zero CO2 equivalence and historically safer than building houses.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...

No, you are wrong. It takes longer than 10 years to permit/build a new nuclear plant and it costs over $1 billion. It is the exact opposite of cheap and fast.

This is about grid generation, so as I said: by GW/h. With solar and wind you have to store and over provision.. there are lots of studies on the cost of replacing nuclear power with solar and wind (just Google "nuclear vs solar price"), even with the current financing mechanisms that solar and wind have (against the over regulation and interest that nuclear has) nuclear is still a order of magnitude cheaper, that is why China is so heavily invested in nuclear as we speak.

Can anyone argue the expected payoff of a 10b investment in nuclear energy vs a 10b investment in energy storage?

"Nuclear power isn't agile. It has poor reactivity to future market changes. It costs billions to get up and running, and isn't modular. You can't commission it in 100MW increments."

If you read the article you'll see that this company plans to produce modular reactors starting at only 5 MW.

Many of the innovative new nuclear startups, like ThorCon and Terrestrial Energy have similar plans. Also, since the plan is to mass produce standardized reactors a whole lot of the regulatory burden associated with the current approach of "one off" construction is avoided.

"A solar power plant requires a dozen handy men and a couple of electrical engineers to maintain, a nuclear power plant requires a few dozen nuclear engineers."

The next generation of modular nuclear reactors will require few or no specialists constantly on site. They also don't require water cooling, so siting options are much more flexible.

"Solar power doesn't have publicly socialized decommissioning or waste storage costs."

Solar power does have externalities having to do with mining, processing and manufacturing. Also, solar requires large tracts of land at utility scale, is intermittent, and unsuitable at higher latitudes. It is currently a good bit more expensive than nuclear will be once modular reactors are being produced.

Solar has significant downsides.

> Coal plants emit much more radiation than nuclear plants - even old ones. There's lots of research about HOW MUCH more radioactive coal power is, but we're talking about anywhere from 50-200% more.

I don't fully understand this argument: A well-maintained nuclear power plant emits next to no radioactivity (compared to the natural background), so a coal plant that emits even a huge factor more radioactivity is still negligible.

I feel like the absolute number (x times more radioactive than nuclear) is really not helpful, if one of the numbers is (just as an example) 0.0001% of natural background, and the other is 0.001% of it.

Failing nuclear plants have contributed far less radiation than working coal plants over the lifetime of nuclear.

The point is that even if you see these failures as inevitable going forwards, coal is the larger radiation threat too, even though the radiation threat from coal is tiny compared to the vast numbers of dead due to respiratory illnesses caused by coal.

Further the fact that nuclear power has to pass a higher safety bar than coal is part of what's making it more expensive.

If we were rational we'd be saying that it's currently too safe and too expensive and we should be compromising on safety to get an overall benefit (through reduced CO2 emissions and reduced radiation from burning coal).

I think at this point it's just considered a dirty word and is probably unrecoverable. If we can make fusion work then the benefit won't just be that it's better but that it's a new brand. There'll still be nuclear waste (you can't prevent radioactivation when you have neutrons), but it'll fusion waste rather than nuclear waste.

Agreed. Nuclear accidents may have made some bits around Chernobyl and Fukushima unpleasant, but coal and oil have ruined the entire planet.

People simply aren't rational. It has been so hard for me to accept that.

>People simply aren't rational. It has been so hard for me to accept that.

You raise an important point: human irrationality is as real as climate change. And probably more challenging.

We might more quickly tackle climate change by simultaneously tackling human irrationality.

It's a shame that more of the best and brightest minds don't enter the (messy)fields of behavioral science - where progress is much less impressive of late than in technology IMHO.

I'm sorry, but to mention Coal at the primary alternative is blatantly untrue in this decade.

Natural gas is the primary fossil fuel alternative, and it burns clean.

From the air pollution safety on the table, you're right. From a more uncertain Carbon emission climate perspective, natural gas is still terrible compared to non emitting sources like nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar.

Well that's true, when I said Burns clean I was referring to the discussion around radioactive and other pollution aspects of coal.

I'm sorry, but claiming natural gas burns clean is blatantly untrue in this decade.

Agreed. This is like the calls to ban self driving car technology such as Tesla's autopilot because they sometimes make mistakes.

Completely overlooked is the number of accidents prevented because of the technology.

Just recently when the guy in Florida was killed while the car was driving under autopilot there was news story after news story about the dangers of it, how it should be outlawed.

To have it 'their way' we could never permit self driving cars until there was a 0% chance of malfunction or accident.

That would be like outlawing seatbelts because on 0.1% of crashes they might cause more injury.

Thankfully reason mostly prevailed in the car "autopilot" battle.

Hopefully reason will eventually prevail in the nuclear power battle.

Couldn't agree more. Chernobyl killed 28 and both Three Mile and Fukushima killed 0. Still people are so afraid of nuclear reactors. This and the opposition to GMO food show that pseudoscientific scaremongering is extremely effective in a scientifically illiterate population.

In case it's not obvious this argument is a disingenuous appraisal of current nuclear energy as a power source.

The important facts that are left unsaid are: when current nuclear goes bad it goes VERY bad indeed; the intermittent powers sources of wind and solar are much less intermittent in aggregate when their geographical dispersion is large enough; the costs of both solar and wind are declining rapidly while nuclear costs are not; widely distributed storage batteries will be come more common as their price continues to decrease and the grid will strengthen in proportion.

Solar and wind have the added important advantage that capacity can be added incrementally whereas nuclear is one huge, wildly expensive project at a time.

I'm not against nuclear in principle. The problem is not, as stated, the unreasonable condition that it has to be 100% safe. The problem is that the risks have to be reasonably limited when something does go wrong. Nuclear fails that requirement.

If there was not a viable alternative to nuclear then sure, nuclear would be a necessity. As it is, nuclear's viability window has closed, at least for now.

It's not a disingenuous appraisal; you're overblowing the safety issues.

When nuclear fails, the bad isn't that bad. Fukushima impact was mostly from panic and unnecessary evacuations. Even Chernobyl wasn't that bad (compare to e.g. hydroelectric dam failures).

As for solar power, I hope what you say is true; I still wonder what's their EROI and real carbon footprint, when you correct for the subsidies (which are fine as means to get solar running, but not fine for calculations of impact on climate and energy security).

> When nuclear fails, the bad isn't that bad. Fukushima impact was mostly from panic and unnecessary evacuations.

Doesn't that imply to some degree that the "isn't that bad" is because we have people to stop it from going really bad when it goes bad? I can't help but feel what's missing from the assessment is the various levels of failures of each technology, how much intervention is required if any to keep it to that failure level, and how likely that failure level is. We're all talking about probability of outcomes but we still seem to be leaving out essential information.

We also need to consider that even with the rapidly improving costs of renewbales, the dollars per GwH generated are still beyond nuclear, and require orders of magnitude more space, which not all countries have available. "Wildly expensive" nuclear is simply not true when put in to the perspective of a national grid vs wind+solar+storage.

The space factor is also at play when you look at geographical dispersion. It's one thing for Australia or the US to have enough solar and wind farms around the country where conditions vary, but what about the UK? A cloudy winter with hardly any sun means they are left with wind, and a day with little wind across a geographical area the size of the UK is not uncommon. It has happened for some lengthy periods, in fact: http://euanmearns.com/flat-calm-across-the-uk/. No storage solutions proposed so far have the longevity needed for the odd extended calm+dark spell.

Europe is at least fortunate enough to have an international electricity market across its internal borders to help manage this, but that largely works because of France's nuclear plants. It is the largest electricity exporter in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...

Define "very bad". The total deaths attributed to Fukushima (including increased chance of cancer over the next decades) is about 100 people. Chernobyl is surrounded by essentially a thriving nature preserve.

What if the nuclear facility were surrounded by a human-forbidden nature preserve the size of the equivalently producing solar/wind farm?

I define "bad" by insurability. If the activity to be pursued has risks so high that no one will insure it. Then that's "very bad".

I believe the "total deaths" argument is dishonest. The death count is so low precisely because we know the danger exists and effect massive evacuation and decontamination programs. Such efforts are very expensive and bring a lot of suffering to those displaced, but those downsides don't register on the "total deaths" scale.

People live in Denver. If a nuclear reactor made a sea level city have the radiation of Denver we would evacuate it.

If it bleeds, it leads. The press will always seek to sensationalize any rare events to gain clicks / views.

For this reason, people vastly outweigh the risks of nuclear meltdown, terrorist attack, plane crash, child abduction, etc. So people are easily swayed to oppose nuclear development by fossil-fuel lobbying.

Since the government must give approval for nuclear plants, their development becomes a political issue, replete with fear-mongering and NIMBYism.

You're citing facts and calling for a balance of risk / reward for energy production, which is noble and should convince the HN crowd. But the reality of nuclear power is that it's political, and facts and politics do not cross paths very often :-)

The way to change public opinion is through education, so I suggest every go and watch Pandora's Promise, which is an excellent documentary about nuclear power.

You are wrong. The alternative is not cole, but of course never-ending energy sources like sun, wind, water etc. - many of those technologies are still in a very early stage because lots of government money was put into nuclear power - for only one single reason: to produce nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons are the only stupid reason why we will leave many unsolvable nuclear waste problems to our children - because of psychotic war-fetishists and primitive anti-social whoriticians.

Luckily the discussions are already won around the globe: renewable energy is the future, no matter how retarded any government will be that US citizens choose to lead "their country".

Of course old school lobbyists that have siphoned billions of dollars selling a failed and plain stupid technology will not just disappear, they will do everything to keep their positions selling their old ideas as "new and clean" and will be an extremely annoying obstacle to human progress for a long time, unfortunately.

But every initiative from these old greedy hateful minority will produce an even stronger impulse of reaction by the open-minded and peace-loving young people that are working hard to establish renewable energy systems around the world.

The time of the anti-social egoist-monkey has gone in most parts of the world.

Nuclear weapon production is not helped by civilian reactors, with the one exception of low-burnup Magnox and CANDU. The all-in cost of nuclear is below that of solar and wind.

Coal is under 40% of US electrical generation and dropping fairly quickly relative to 50+ year plant lifetimes.

Peak was near 60% in late 80's and it's dropped 30%. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=25392. Current issue is it's more expencive than wind and not viable as peaking power, just like Nuclear making this a non starter.

I don't think that helps. People are terrible at assessing risk. Just look at flying. There are people who are afraid to fly, some to the point where it's impossible. Compare that to driving, which is far riskier yet where is the equivalent phobia?

I think there's two reasons for this:

1. People trust the familiar.

2. An event with a plane is likely to be catastrophic.

Both of th set factors work against nuclear power too. Between Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, no one is going to trust it or want it in their backyard. That's a problem because nuclear plants need water and that puts them near people.

Then add in distrust of companies to run them properly, th spent fuel storage problem and this logistics chain that creates the opportunity for malfeasance (i.e. Terrorists getting their hand on materials for a dirty bomb) and its almost I,possible.

So it doesn't matter what coal does or doesn't do, people are used to it and catastrophic failure scenarios are greatly diminished.

Renewable sourc s that create fuel you can use elsewhere are currently cost prohibitive (i.e. It's more expensiv than drilling for oil or digging up coal) but the cost is co,king down. This provides a ceiling on just how expensive traditional power generation can get.

I'm very foreign to facts like these about coal. I had always assumed/considered it "dirty energy", but that is all i had known. With that said, my coworker seems to think "coal is far more clean than most people think", and is pro-coal.

Are there some really blatant and easy to digest articles explaining coal? Eg, 800,000 deaths sounds big, and while i don't agree with my coworker, i assume those deaths are far more subtle and debatable. To be clear, i'm not trying to defend coal, i just want to provide him with some clear and irrefutable evidence.

I recently had a discussion with family about nuclear energy. One member was worried about it because the plants would be targets for foreign attacks. I told him we already have plenty of plants operating that could be attacked. Then I quickly pulled up a list of all the nuclear plants in the US. There's already one less then a hundred miles from his home. He still wasn't convinced.

I think a lot of people have irrational fear about nuclear and nothing short of a miracle will change that.

You could use the same argument to justify pushing renewables or even gas. It is pragmatic because it is easy. Nuclear engineering is hard.

Most energy development "in the real world" is financially driven. This applies even when other political objectives exist. The uncertainty in costs of nuclear are a serious issue that makes renewables seem like the pragmatic solution.

This supposed cabal in the fossil fuel industry apparently extends to to the insurance industry. I can insure a gas fired plant, but not a nuke.

Maybe that is due to some fault in the way non-nuclear liability is calculated. Or, just maybe, the environmental and economic destruction that happens when nuclear plants suffer major malfunctions, especially when their operation is extended past the initial designed lifespan, is so large it is impossible to insure in a way that makes economic sense.

There was a book making this case in detail, The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear. I liked it when I read it 30 years ago.

> Coal power is responsible for 800,000 deaths per year

Umm... source? Clean Air Task Force puts U.S. deaths at 13K/year.[1]

Obviously the concern with nuclear is not that it needs to achieve "zero deaths". That is a straw man argument. It's Chernobyl, Fukushima, etc. and waste.

[1] http://www.catf.us/fossil/problems/power_plants/

I think the 800k figure may be a global number. This 2012 Forbes article has a global average 100,000 deaths _per trillion kWhr_[1]. I have no clue if the the world uses 8 trillion kWhr of coal power in a year though.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

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